Developer releases pseudoroot to enable unprivileged Linux package building

A developer working on a Gentoo-focused CLI packaging tool called portage-cli has released pseudoroot, a utility designed to simulate root privileges without requiring actual elevated access during software builds. The challenge arises because some packages need to create device files or set up dedicated users at install time, operations that normally require root. Existing approaches such as fakeroot use dynamic linker interposition, while tools like bubblewrap and hakoniwa leverage Linux namespaces for sandboxing with near-zero overhead, though neither fully covers device file creation. The developer is also contributing to fakeroost to improve its performance, particularly in anticipation of statically linked build systems becoming more common. pseudoroot was chosen as the primary solution for being faster and more capable than current alternatives, with sandbox technologies like Landlock potentially complementing it in future.